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It’s too limited in utility

My issue is that it is designed to do too many things, and is unlikely to do any of them well. A moon ship is going to have an inefficient shape for carting stuff up to the ISS or some other orbital facility.

A mars ship needs to be stored, in space, for years and then start up first try with no errors. This tends to require systems so simple that they can't fail. But those same systems are mass inefficient in a ship just designed for Orbital or Moon missions where the ship can be kept active the entire time, or where the crew has the option of an emergency return home.

NASA needs to decide what it wants to do, then bill ships to do those jobs. If we are just going to truck stuff up to the ISS then a reusable makes sense. Mars shots are going to be a rare bird, if they happen at all with the current state of the economy. So an expendable ship built with a shape for high speed reentry, and with systems so simple it can't fail is probably best for that mission.

You see, I fell into the trap of thinking too conventionally. I was thinking of a “one size fits all” vehicle. My bad. The thought that it could be stored, and that we might need a separate vehicle for the different types of missions, never entered my mind.

And I call myself a creative thinker...pfftt!

For the love o’ pete, Please, PLEASE, go look at the mission profiles for the Constellation program. The ORion spacecraft is only part of the system. One thing ISS has taught us is that building spacecraft IN SPACE is not only feasable, but works rather well.

The Moon Missions will have Orion as a Command Module, and Altair as the lander. The Mars Missions will have Orion as a Command Module, and other items as part of a larger spacecraft complex, including interplanetary propulsion and Mars Landers, and habitation sections.